Eagle eye: A dual-radio architecture in delay tolerant networks

In most delay tolerant network (DTN) applications, mobile nodes utilize WiFi radios to obtain local information and transmit data. One bottleneck on DTN delivery performance is the short communication range of the WiFi radio. Rather than designing efficient protocols on WiFi based DTN, we propose a novel dual-radio architecture by adding a long-range low-bitrate eagle eye (EE) radio on every node. This EE radio can “see” real-time movement information of nodes in a significantly large range, and so much early scheduling can be done with this radio when compared with WiFi which is still in charge of data transmissions. Benefiting from this cooperative dual radios architecture, we design distributed EE routing protocol for minimizing delivery delay in DTNs. Through our prototype implementation with 7 EE devices and simulations based on real trace data of 4000 taxis in Shanghai, we show that the proposed architecture is able to achieve as low as 40% of the average delay with traditional DTNs.